1. Field
The present invention relates to a system management technology for identifying a symptom of a problem in an object to manage and determine a countermeasure against the symptom.
2. Description of the Related Art
If a problem occurs in an information processing system, a countermeasure has been taken based on know-how owned by a person in charge, such as a system administrator.
The know-how is accumulated by each person in charge based on his/her experience of coping with individual problems, and usually not shared sufficiently. Therefore, there can be a large difference in the level of coping with the problems among the persons in charge.
To eliminate such dependence on the personal skills and increase speed and quality of the countermeasures to be taken, there has been proposed technologies of storing stylized know-how related to various problems that can occur to the information system in a database and using the database to identify the symptom and determine the countermeasure to be taken against the identified symptom.
For example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2004-145536 discloses a conventional technology of automatically detecting a performance degradation of a network system, finding the cause, and notifying the system administrator of the countermeasure. Further, there has been disclosed another conventional technology of autonomously solving a problem by an autonomic manager referring to the database for solving the problem when the problem occurs. Reference may be had to “An architectural blueprint for autonomic computing”, [online], IBM Corporation, searched on June 30, 2006.
The above conventional technologies postulate that the know-how related to determination of the countermeasure is sufficiently examined before storing it in the database to appropriately determine the countermeasure to solve the symptom of the device having the problem.
Therefore, if the know-how is stored in the database without being fully examined or if the stored know-how becomes outdated due to change of an environment or the like, an inappropriate countermeasure is selected more often, thereby drastically reducing the reliability of the system.